Thursday, January 25, 2007

Ask.com & Maverick's - Best Search Sponsorship...Ever

I received the below email from Sean Cummings, Director of Marketing at Ask.com. On the heels of a great Web2.0 conference after-party, Ask.com is sponsoring the upcoming Maverick's Big Wave Surf Contest. Tubular details from Sean below. If you love big waves and paid search, this is The Event Of 2007. I will see you there:

"...hella-stoked! (practicing my NorCal speak) ... So if anyone is interested in crazy people riding 40' waves over jagged rocks in frigid water check here to get the lowdown. The contest goes off on only 24 hours notice; probably in the next two weeks, but that depends on the swells coming in. You can go here and signup for a text alert to find out when it's on.

[Travel logistics note from a buddy who's gone the last few years: If you drive some good advice would be to throw your bike in the rear of your rig – park at the Safeway (end of highway 92) & ride the mile or so to pillar point. The traffic the last two years has been bumper to bumper form highway 92 to the town of Princeton where mavericks is located. This little 2 mile stretch can take over an hour or even two - there is no parking at all @ Mavericks so you will have to park at the little airport down the road & be shuttled in. Even better advice is to drive over highway 84 (through la Honda stop at Applejacks have some breakfast & a beer) take a right on highway 1 & then up the road to where the traffic starts, park & ride ]

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

More On Distribution Fraud in Search

Happy New Year everyone; I've not posted in ages, but hopefully I'll have a bit more time to post going forward.

I wrote back in December about distribution fraud in the world of search, and the article quickly became the 3rd most read entry on my blog. In it I talked about the fact that a growing percentage of Google's search network traffic is, in fact, AdSense for Domains traffic where there's no searching involved - only navigational clicks and non-contextual ones at that.

Google's decision to condone this distribution fraud will cost them tens of billions in market cap - mark my words. For the time being it appears they're going to choose pleasing investors over pleasing advertisers, and the result will be either

a) chargebacks by advertisers, perhaps aided by class action lawyers who, unlike SEM's and advertisers, don't need to stay in the good graces of Google to conduct business

b) accelerated advertiser adoption of Ask.com and AOL direct ppc ad buys. After all, once an advertiser has Google.com, Ask.com and AOL search traffic, they can turn of Google's search network with no appreciable loss in conversions.

c) accelerated adoption of Yahoo and MSN ppc

d) hastening of the arrival of the point of diminishing returns for advertisers on Google and thus deceleration in Google's growth rates

There's a SEW thread on the topic of AdSense for Domains; start reading post #21 on page 2 and go from there. The thread started over a year ago and picked up again early Jan ’07. In it there are some pretty powerful, negative anecdotes on the ROI advertisers are seeing from AdSense for Domains – and strong opinions on why Google is doing evil by not letting advertisers opt out of it.

The second is an equally detailed blog post by Richard Ball at Apogee Web Consulting which covers both the history of AdSense domain traffic and what appears – to Richard and I and many others, at least – to be a very clear cut case of Google’s revenue ambitions getting the better of their ‘do no evil’ mantra.